Pom Gets Wi-Fi: The Tumblr RPG

This week we review the popular new indie RPG Pom Gets Wi-Fi as well as the psycho puzzle point and click, Dopaminium: The Heal Journey! Will this feisty Pomeranian get the Plaster stamp of approval, and will her yaoi OTP come to fruition? Read on, my children.

DOPAMINIUM, 2013

For years, I used to sit at the loser table. The cheerleaders and jocks would all laugh at our plight as they took drags of their cheerleader- and jock-brand cigarettes and popped teenager LSD. My parents would never let me do the opiums and visit the crazy parties, so I looked to alternatives: healing crystals, candy cigars, temp tattoos you get from those rainbow zebra chewing gum packages, probably yin yoga.

Finally, it is my turn to laugh. Thanks to “Dopaminium,” I have twelve boyfriends. Thanks to “Dopaminium,” I’m a cage fighting champion and run a successful pet fashion blog run entirely from my toaster. Thanks to “Dopaminium,” the surreal Flash game by Shaman4d released last October, I can experience the wild acid trips I have been missing out on throughout my unfulfilled teenage life, and now, so can you!

“Dopaminium: The Heal Journey” is about solving non-logic puzzles by interacting with a strange visual medium, in order to liberate a series of strange creatures and collect various tokens in the rooms of your mind. Presumably all the imagery, from astronauts to popping balloons to fish falling from the sky, is totes deep and symbolic, but I’m choosing to ignore this layer and appreciate the game for all its John Clowder-esque weirdness. I really actually enjoyed and was sometimes challenged by the puzzles, which were largely designed around the idea of testing the waters (sometimes literally because there was a boat level HA!) by forming relationships between objects to see what new, unexpected events will appear out of the delightfully gritty nowhere.

POM GETS WI-FI, 2013

For years, I used to sit at the prep table. The scene and hipster kids would all laugh at our plight as they clacked away on their scene- and hipster-kid tumblrs. My parents would never let me do the shitty image macros and visit the crazy Geocities sites, so I looked to alternatives: exercise, which didn’t work.

Finally, it is my turn to laugh.

Creator Me-Patra designed “Pom” under the premise of being the “happiest, least scary game ever made” in a market filled with not happy and scary games, even if the fear factor only stems from the fact people still think allusions to Alice in Wonderland are clever. As a result, “Pom Gets Wi-Fi” is like tumblr and a DS had sex inside an RPG Maker 2003 window!

You play as the titular Pom, a Pomeranian with the massive attitude of being blasted by a busted fire hydrant. Pom and her housemate Shibe the shibe were killed in a fire — there goes that whole happiness pledge from about ten seconds ago — and are sent to the confines of a brightly-colored dog heaven, where they must solve puzzles and endure a surprising number of Zero Escape references in order to obtain internet access.

“Pom” has recently come under some fire for its unexpected popularity and claim on nearly every category for the 2013 Misaos. That’s probably because the actual gaming experience is exceptionally unexceptional.

Its few battles and puzzle-solving scenarios are linear and fairly dull, including Pom’s Super Saiyan coup against Dog, the canine ruler of dog heaven. Though depicted in an adorably saturated, modern art style, the cast is mostly comprised of expies and all the most embarrassing parts of tumblr culture, which is to say the entirety of tumblr culture, ooh gotcha zing triple snap. It’s reasonable, seeing as this is the artist’s “self-indulgent mess of a first game,” but unfortunately the surprise attention has put the piece in RMN’s hot seat. In the words of our favorite-least-favorite Pomeranian, “punch me in da dick!!”

Winner of Miss Best Effort seven years and counting, Plasterbrain spends her days pretending to code, writing music, and third bullet point. Her top three first dates would be hunting for slugs, writing fanfiction about Hanzo, and a joint Powerpoint presentation. Oh wait wait wait! Can I add a fourth? The fourth is Neopets.